ZaReason I use this hardware

After nearly two years of daily use sometimes for double-digit hours a day, the left-click button on the ZaReason Alto 3880 finally surrendered. No mas, no mas. To be fair, my game-playing, Steam-testing daughter was using the Alto and it stands to reason that the left-click button — widely used in whatever she was playing or, ahem, “testing” — would give up the ghost at some point; for it to last as long as it did under the pressure of higher scores (and making games safe for Linux) is in fact remarkable.

But “remarkable” doesn’t stop there. A note to ZaReason and back to ZaReason in Berkeley, California, it went. Remarkably quickly, it came back to me just under a week later.

Now the Alto gets a reprieve. I’m taking back the laptop to do more sane things like coding, maintaining certain forums and sites, and doing all the things I do with “the football,” the laptop that accompanies me everywhere. It gets a fresh install of CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf” and back to work it goes. The ThinkPad T60 that once served as the daily lappie gets an extended vacation and goes back to the lab for software testing.

So many thanks, ZaReason, for making quality hardware and, when it succumbs to the slings and arrows of way-too-extreme use, backing it up with outstanding service. You have earned yet another lifelong customer.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Not quite. When the left mouse button went south, we swapped laptops — I had a Toshiba Satellite LG455 (I think that’s the number) that had roughly the same specs as the ZaReason (or specs enough to keep playing/testing), so she’s been working on that one while I went to using the ThinkPad T60.

There no money in the household budget for a new laptop for anyone, sadly.

I wanted t buy a ZaReason. I really did. Was all monied up and ready to order, and alas, they discontinued the model I wanted. Wound up with a reconditioned Lenovo Thinkpad T400 instead. I’ve been very happy with the Thinkpad, but the ZaReason line has so much going for it.